Two Texas girls accused of creating a fake Facebook page and impersonating a classmate were detained (and may still be detained) on July 16 and have been charged with online impersonation, a third degree felony. Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds has compared the Facebook impersonation to identity theft, which, he explained when the girls were first arrested, is typically used for "financial gain." "This [the alleged Facebook incident] was just to try and get back at a person," said Deeds, "and ruin them socially, so it's a big deal.

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The girls, 12- and 13-years-old respectively, allegedly used the fake page to threaten people in their school, making it seem like their 12-year-old classmate was casting aspersions on her peers as wantonly as one might cast dandelion seeds about a meadow, or some other similarly open plane of land. The victim's parents reported the Facebook page to the sheriff's office back in June, before the suspects' identities had been sussed out by some diligent gumshoeing. When Sheriff Deeds figured out that the architects of the fake Facebook page were really the victim's frenemies, he supposed that there would be some sort of reconciliation. The victim's parents, however, having seen their daughter endure some Count of Monte Cristo shit, weren't so conciliatory.

Since Texas law shields juvenile court records, no one quite knows whether the girls have been released from the detention center they were being held in or not, though Chris Hansen from the ACLU (which isn't involved in the Hood County incident) told NBC that there has been a recent uptick in punishments for childern and teens harassing each other online. He also added that the girls' ages are a little "striking," and wondered whether it was totally on the level to treat people so young as adults, even if they had used the internet to make someone else's life miserable.